Category: Technology (Page 1 of 12)

Ninja Coffeemaker

A month ago, after my Keurig shit the bed, I replaced it with a Ninja.  When Hertz was the biggest car rental company, Avis advertised that, “We’re number 2, so we try harder.”  Maybe Keurig had been slacking. 

The Ninja is a good setup.  I am not a coffee snob, but figure the Ninja has enough brewing options that anyone should be able to dial it in.

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Rolling back the CAFE standards for cars.

CBS News:  Trump administration moves to roll back fuel economy standards set under Biden

If finalized, the plan would relax fuel economy standards by setting the industry average for light-duty vehicles at roughly 34.5 miles per gallon through the 2031 model year, lower than the 50 miles per gallon outlined by a Biden-era rule.

For fifty years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) set fuel economy standards that car companies had to meet.  It was a type of magical thinking.  The NHTSA would issue a new fuel economy standard, and like Captain Picard on Star Trek, say, “Make it so.” 

The NHTSA didn’t have to worry about physics, they just had to wish for it.  The engineering teams had to figure out how to pull another rabbit out of the same old hat.  The rabbits were getting smaller and harder to find.

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The European Space Agency is going to miss American money.

SPACE: Will Europe’s flagship space science missions survive NASA’s budget cuts?

Flagship European space science missions conducted in collaboration with NASA face a possible combined funding shortfall of nearly $2 billion due to budget cuts put forward by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. The European Space Agency hopes its member states will come to the rescue.

Europe’s flagship space science missions may be worthwhile, but they aren’t ours, so why are we funding them?   It’s only about twenty bucks per American taxpayer, but do that for 10,000 other foreign agencies and projects, and it starts to add up.

Technology won’t save us from old folks.

WSJ: Old Age Will Be Different in the Robotic Age

WSJ: Old Age Will Be Different in the Robotic Age

Machines could soon help elders get out of bed, bathe them, even provide them with emotional support.

I always figured this problem would be solved by the Japanese inventing competent Elder-bots, the Chinese making cheap knock-offs and an American start-up company offering free robots that tended to the feeble as it harvested confidential medical information to defraud Medicaid.  That won’t happen.

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